I write about innovation, careers,and unforgettable personalities. My Forbes magazine cover stories have analyzed Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn, Amazon and Hewlett-Packard. In 1997, while at The Wall Street Journal, I shared in a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Along the way, I've written four books: "Merchants of Debt," "Health Against Wealth," "Perfect Enough" and "The Rare Find." Contact me anytime at GCAForbes@gmail.com

Are They Learning Or Cheating? Online Teaching's Dilemma

Online-teaching pioneers such as Coursera and Udacity are beaming top professors’ lessons into students’ homes worldwide, while slashing costs, getting rid of stuffy lecture halls and improving public access. But they’re having a harder time with one of teaching’s eternal headaches: stopping students’ cheating.

The Chronicle of Higher Education this week reported that Coursera’s online students have filed dozens of complaints about plagiarism by peers in humanities courses. Among the accusations: concern that an essay in the Fantasy and Science Fiction class was nothing more than a rehash of a Wikipedia entry.

Eric Rabkin, a University of Michigan English professor who is teaching Fantasy and Science Fiction, issued a mass warning to his 39,000 students, telling them that they shouldn’t plagiarize. In an interview with the Chronicle, he said one student had admitted cutting and pasting other published articles into an essay, while professing ignorance that academia regards such practices as wrong.

Charles Severance, another Michigan professor teaching a course on the history of the Internet, also issued an anti-plagiarism warning to his students.

In a FORBES interview in May, Coursera cofounder Andrew Ng said his company was “working on the technology” needed to catch cheating attempts as systematically as possible. Coursera already asks students to abide by an honor code; it is likely to add additional safeguards.

In its humanities courses, Coursera asks students to grade one another’s work, using a detailed rubric developed for each course. Such peer grading saves time, and can correlate closely with the grades that traditional instructors might provide. But it can put an unusual burden on students to screen for evidence of cheating in their peers’ work.

Websites and software already exist for detecting student essays that closely mimic existing published work. iParadigm, a company started by four Berkeley students in 1998, operates TurnItIn, a Web service that ran plagiarism screens on 60 million student papers last year. It serves both high schools and universities, checking papers against databases that include 20 billion Web pages and an archive of 220 million previously submitted student papers.

Plagiarized essays, however, are only part of the cheating-related issues that online education providers must guard against. In online science classes, there’s a risk that ambitious students may start the class several times, using dummy accounts so that they can gradually master multiple-choice quizzes. Such schemes would let them eventually take the class under their real name, with a strong prospect of a perfect or near-perfect score.

Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, said in May that he isn’t yet able to say with certainty whether registered students’ submitted work in online classes fully matches their true capabilities. If providers of massive massive open online courses (MOOCs) want to offer formal credentials to graduates, he observes, they will need to sort out strategies for verifying student work.

Right now, MOOC vendors such as Coursera and Udacity aren’t offering traditional course credit. But in non-U.S. markets — where completing a course offered by a big-name U.S. professor carries some cachet — the MOOC companies will need to clarify how much or how little they are doing to gauge whether students really did their own work to complete the class. Otherwise, MOOCs’ hopes of positioning themselves as an important part of the long-term future of higher education will be in doubt.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

As an On-line student I would say any person that is cheating would be waisting their own time trying to get any type of on-line degree, having the knowledge and pretending to have the knowledge will eventually surface in due time. The school I attend uses the turnitin system and it works rather well, it even allows you to view how much of your work is acceptable. I believe having students check other students papers would take away time from them correcting their own papers. I understand the learning process but, how do you teach or correct someone else when you don’t know what or how to correct it yourself?

Might proctored exams be the solution to this? Assuming final exams had to be taken in person, and MOOCs had a way of verifying the identity of each person enrolled in their online courses, it would be hard to fake the results.

For final exams, you’re absolutely right, proctoring is the way to go. The MOOC folks have some pretty specific ideas about setting up testing centers in different geographies and running ID checks, etc. Costs would be covered — and then some — by charging test-takers some amount for the opportunity to have their knowledge and work fully validated.

What’s harder is how to deal with student essays, short-answer responses or intermittent quizzes during the course of the class. The honor system might work for 90% of students or even more. Hard to say. But it won’t work for all. Physical-world universities struggle with these issues, too … and have the threat of expulsion or suspension to keep temptation under control. The MOOCs can’t really wield the expulsion club to much effect, so they may need to try harder to come up with automated and peer-driven ways to keep the cheaters’ path from looking inviting.

I am currently taking the Coursera course Fantasy and Science Fiction. We are asked to write a weekly essay so for this a proctored exam will not work. The depth of thinking that is required when we write the essays I don’t think can be replaced by an exam. We are required to bring our own thoughts to the reading. I have found the Coursera experience to be a good one and rigorous. We are reading a novel a week. The lectures from Professor Rabkin are terrific. I have been lucky none of the essays I have graded so far appeared to be plagiarized. It would be great though if a system was in place so students don’t feel it necessary to police each other.

Technology is so advanced that i believe that very soon scientists will find the perfect way to review the final examinations. I suppose that they will invent some kind of scanner that will have the ability to control the test. First, from specific tests, it will identify the person’s ID and also it will have the ability to detect if he cheats. Moreover, there are existing programs so far that are used from various businesses and public organizations and they can monitor an employee while he is working. It records the number of times you have typed or clicked the mouse, it keeps the history of your actions in detail, and it has the ability to shoot the desktop. Therefore, I do not find very difficult to invent something for the cheating.

Two weeks ago I was involved in a Twitter conversation with David Stavens of Udacity hosted by Hybrid Pedagogy. I inquired as to the possibility of incorporating embedded librarians into MOOCs. Several days ago, I pondered the proliferation of plagiarism in MOOCs and the possibility of embedding librarians to assist in a potential plagiarism issue: http://bit.ly/PsSPta.

Thanks for commenting. Over the past 15 years, I’ve come to believe that the digital information explosion makes great librarians more valuable than ever. Most of us are amateurs at figuring out what data resources are out there — and how to use them. Every time I’ve had the good fortune to work with a professional librarian, I’ve been impressed at how many ways they’ve found to track down the knowledge I need.

Yes, if the MOOC folks want to build up a full curriculum, instead of just offering an assortment of isolated courses, finding some way to sharpen up students’ ability to do a good literature search is crucial.

At this stage in the MOOC game, it may not seem so serious. However, when academics laud the potential of free mass education, and universities begin giving out academic credit for MOOCs, there is a serious issue. Dazzled by the cache of prestigious American education, see the University of Helsinki: http://bit.ly/RZVRId.

Cheating among college students is a serious problem … however most empirical studies show that the cheating is NOT a problem that is either unique to online learning or more prevalent online than it is in the classroom.

People “believe” cheating MUST be more common online, but that is largely an unfounded belief based on anecdotal evidence rather than empirical studies.

On study, for example, found that 32.1% of live-class and 32.7% of online-class students admitted to cheating at the college level.

Below is a decent summary of research findings in this area copied verbatim from a journal paper titled “Cheating in the Digital Age,” at http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring131/watson131.html.

“With the advent of web-based assessments the opportunity to use illegitimate means to improve grades is a concern (Kennedy, K., Nowak, S., Raghuraman, R., Thomas, J. & Davis, S., 2000; Smith, Ferguson, & Caris, 2003). The perception that cheating occurs more often in on-line courses has been studied by King, Guyette, & Piotrowski (2009), in which they found that 73.8% of students surveyed felt that it was easier to cheat in an on-line class. The question remains however, do web-based assessments encourage a higher rate of student cheating than non-web-based assessments? There are some conflicting results among researchers who have studied this issue. A study by Grijalva and others (2006) found that there was no significant difference between cheating on regular paper assessments and web-based assessments. Grijalva and others’ (2006) study of 796 students enrolled in undergraduate online courses found that approximately 3% of students admitted to cheating, which was similar to findings for students in traditional courses. Nevertheless, a study by Lanier (2006) of 1,262 college students found that student cheating in on-line courses was significantly higher than in live classes. Another study, by Stuber-McEwen and others (2009) had a conflicting finding, in that students cheated less in on-line classes.”

In fact, some empirical studies suggest that cheating on campus is a worse problem than cheating online. Those studies that conclude there is less cheating online often cite that online students tend to be older and that online class assessments tend to be authentic assessments — such as applied work projects — with such work and applied projects, unlike traditional college essays, being very hard to “fake” or “copy.”

I mention the above because there is a myth that one of the big problems “unique to online learning” is the cheating problem.

Cheating is not unique to online learning and in fact many of the assessment methods and techniques used in online learning may make that method more cheat-proof than the good old-fashioned instructional methods favored face to face with younger students.

There are many-many problems with massive open courses — many that most who register for them NEVER complete them — but I am not convinced cheating should be framed as a problem unique this type of online learning.

Great article and thought provoking. Being a self directed learner is a tough thing and sometimes the thing that many people overlook when they start their journey with online learning. The idea that ethics and cheating is a big part of any educational institution should be discussed and the fact that resources are so readily available is not only an online issue because I have seen it prevalent in brick and mortar institutions.